The word 'critical" has three meanings which are dangerous, important, and disapproving. The purpose of this blog is to examine important or over-looked cultural, political, artistic, or historical issues of our time. Also, this blog is intended to be educational.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Vanishing Languages

Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, soon
could be extinct, according to a recent report. In existence for some 3,000
years and once commonly used all across the Middle East, this ancient tongue is
now rapidly dying out. And it’s not just Aramaic that’s disappearing. Experts
predict that 50 percent to 90 percent of today’s languages will have vanished
by the end of this century.

According
to arecent report in Smithsonian magazine,
Aramaic, once widely used for commerce and government, could likely disappear
within a generation or two. A leading scholar of modern Aramaic, University of
Cambridge linguist Geoffrey Khan, is trying to document all of Aramaic’s
dialects before its final native speakers die out. As part of his work, Khan
has interviewed subjects in Chicago’s northern suburbs, home to a significant
population of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians who left their native
countries in the Middle East to escape persecution and war.

The
Assyrian people adopted Aramaic (which originated with desert nomads known as
the Arameans) when they established an empire in the Middle East in the eighth
century B.C. Even after the Assyrians were conquered, the language thrived in
the region for centuries. (Famously, the dialogue in Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The
Passion of the Christ, about the final 12 hours of Jesus’ life, was in
Aramaic and Latin.)

Aramaic remained the common language
in the Middle East until the seventh century A.D., when it was replaced by
Arabic by invading Muslim forces from Arabia. Afterward, Aramaic continued to
be spoken only by non-Muslims in remote mountain areas of Iran, Iraq, Syria and
Turkey. Over the past century, as Aramaic speakers have fled their villages for
cities and other countries (such as the Chicago-area Assyrians interviewed by
Khan), the language hasn’t been passed on to younger generations.

Today, there could be as many as
500,000 Aramaic speakers dispersed around the planet; however, this figure is
deceptive. Researchers believe there are more than 100 different dialects of
the mother tongue, known as Neo-Aramaic, some of which have already become
extinct. Other dialects have few living speakers, and in most cases Aramaic is
only used as an oral and not a written language.

Aramaic is far from the only
endangered language. Linguists fear that, as the world becomes increasingly
connected, 50 percent to 90 percent of the approximately 7,000 languages in use
today could be gone by the end of the century. As things stand now, 94 percent
of the people on the planet communicate in just 6 percent of its languages. The
most spoken languages are Chinese,
Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese and
Javanese.